We describe a system for collecting, filtering, processing, and ranking information related to user-generated content in 3D virtual worlds such as Second Life™, for the purpose of creating a search service for 3D content.
3D objects in virtual worlds have associated meta-data that may include a title or name, a short description, the objects' location in the virtual world, information about the owners and the creators of the objects, the objects' textures (e.g., images), the objects permissions, and several flags that indicate, for example, whether the object is for sale and for how much. In addition an object can have other associated resources, including blocks of text or sounds, and contained objects from which additional meta-data can be obtained. Similarly, virtual worlds include the notion of virtual land, called places, that also has similar meta-data. Places are often defined by a finite 2D area with extremely large height.
The invention described here pertains to collecting as much information as possible from the virtual world, and then (1) filtering out information that is of no public interest, (2) processing the information so that the most useful parts get used; and (3) ranking the search results according to relevance.
Thus, there is still a need for methods of searching a virtual world for virtual objects.